Monday, June 23, 2014

When my now five-month-old daughter was born in January, I spent
our first snowbound weeks together doing mostly one thing: nursing. My baby had
lost almost 15% of her birth weight, and needed round-the-clock nourishment for
her blood sugars to stabilize. Her appetite was voraciously up to the task, but
her mouth was miniscule, and so breastfeeding took most of the day and a good
portion of the night. In the upper Midwest, a
polar vortex coincided with my newborn vortex. Each day crept along timelessly
inside my nursing station: Boppy pillow on lap, water and phone on coffee
table, and laptop computer balanced on knees. I mastered one-handed typing—lots
of congratulatory emails to respond to—and spent hours mindlessly clicking,
reading aloud to my daughter whatever I found to read.

Though the hours together were long, my attention span was
short. The combination of exhaustion and adrenaline made it difficult to
concentrate on anything longer than a page or two. In addition to the circuit
of parenting sites I visited daily (the rabbit hole of BabyCenter must be circled
cautiously), I began reading my daughter back issues of Brevity, with its
maximum 750-word essays. This is how, somewhere in my second or third week of
parenting, I worked my way back to Issue 39, and J.D. Shraffenberger’s "Dropping Babies".

The title alone almost made me skip it. My postpartum
hormones had already sworn off Animal Planet (polar bear cubs starving in the
Arctic, cheetahs picking off baby impala in the East African plains), Children’s
Hospital commercials, and Jezebel, which, for some feminist reason, seems to
report on every grisly infant death in America. Fears that something would
happen to my daughter (or to me, or my husband, leaving her without a mother or
father) were already keeping me up at night, my two selves—parent and writer,
one horrified to imagine, the other compelled to imagine—locked in battle for
my thoughts.

But I was too intrigued, and so began to read aloud
Schraffenberger’s braided meditation on babies dropped or dangled from the
heights. Yes, literal heights.

The opening section of the essay recalls the now-disproven
belief that babies don’t feel pain. Schraffenberger describes how they were
once subjected to surgery without anesthesia, their bodies “open to the light
of medical wisdom, a revelation of human anatomy in miniature.” That babies
reveal what it means to be human is further explored by subsequent sections,
where two dominant strands emerge: an examination of a five-hundred-year-old
tradition in a west Indian village where babies are dropped from the temple’s
fifty-foot tower and caught, unharmed, on a bed sheet, and a confession about
the night Schraffenberger, frustrated with his own baby’s inconsolable crying,
dropped her onto her crib mattress.

“I want to say it was only a few inches,” Schraffenberger
writes. “I want to say I wasn’t myself, but babies, especially your own, have a
way of showing you exactly who you are, or at least what you’re capable of in
the middle of the night.”

What we’re capable of is often found at the heart of
confession in creative nonfiction. Among the most common criticisms of the
genre, nothing seems to fan the flames of controversy like the confessional.
While I agree with practitioners like Vivian Gornick and Michael Steinberg that
successful personal narrative must push past anecdote, as Schraffenberger’s
does, I also believe the confessional is still important, and not because it’s
brave or courageous to show our uglier selves to the world, not because those
uglier selves require absolution. The term “confession” suggests something
invalid about the action or urge confessed, but in cases like
Schraffenberger’s, where the narrator’s actions are meant to be representative,
confession becomes inclusive, offering a way out of isolation. It presents us
with a mandate to sanction human experience.

Let’s face it: on the judgment front, parents have it rough
out there. Those who admit to formula feeding, or sleep training, or, as Kim
Brooks recently
did on Salon, leaving their toddler unattended in a vehicle for a few
minutes in moderate weather, are likely to find themselves crucified in the
comments, called negligent, abusive, unfit. There is no room for error in an
age when your parenting may be recorded on someone’s cell phone and submitted
as evidence to police.

Which makes Schraffenberger’s confession indeed brave. The
comments on Brevity were refreshingly non-judgy—most praised the stark honesty
and quality of the writing (and curiously, some assumed Schraffenberger was a
woman—that’s another conversation we should have). But Brevity’s audience is
mainly literary. When I imagine Shraffenberger’s piece appearing in a more
general interest venue, I shudder to think of the comment thread.

It’s hard to isolate mixed feelings about confession in
nonfiction from the cultural response to confession online. Last week, The
Atlantic reported
that people who “overshare” on Facebook often find themselves ostracized from
the very people whose approval and attention they seek. Culturally speaking, it
seems we’re put off by those who bare-all in public, whether on social media or
in literature.

The study reminded me of a Facebook conversation I read
while pregnant with my daughter. A friend posted a confession she’d heard from
a woman who was so dissatisfied with parenthood that she once considered
putting her child up for adoption. My friend didn’t name names (presumably, the
other woman was not on Facebook), and maintained a strictly nonjudgmental
stance, showing remarkable empathy for the woman’s feelings. But she openly wondered
about the woman’s predicament. When it comes to the intense commitment and
emotional gravity of parenthood, how can you “fake the feelings you’re supposed
to have?” she wrote.

Over 150 comments followed. Many commenters similarly
empathized with the woman in question, and thought it healthy that she
articulated her feelings. But others were shaken by the woman’s confession.
Even in confidence, these commenters said, she was doing harm to her child by
verbalizing her real feelings. One commenter made the interesting claim that
the woman’s admission may have come from “the psychology of the rise of
narcissism in an evolving American (and at times other) culture built of
audience, confession and self absorption.”

My friend’s friend was not, of course, composing an essay
about her dissatisfaction with motherhood. But the idea of her confession as
narcissistic echoes the most common criticism lobbed at memoirists and personal
essayists. In his post over at Bending Genre, “Uncertain Certainties”, Mike Scalise compiles responses to the question, “What is
your least favorite thing about the nonfiction reading experience (besides
writers who lie)?” Some of the answers he received largely underscored the
narcissism complaint, but one response surprised him. A friend Scalise calls
Annie said it was “the performance of certainty around massively complicated
life stuff.” In other words, nonfictionists too often try to make the meaning of
their narratives concrete, rather than leaving meaning to more abstract
implications.

Scalise wonders if the “digestible” forms of nonfiction
pervasive on the Internet may be to blame:

But there’s a brand of creative
nonfiction that has seemed to thrive more than any other: a kind of blunt
confessor’s tale, a one-thousandish-word personal story of often high, earnest
stakes and utter danger, where a writer unveils a painful scenario they’ve
either survived or endured or been implicated in. You’ve seen these pieces.
They’ve shown up in your feeds with accompanying comments like “thank you for
writing this,” or “beautiful” or “so brave” or just simply “this.” They’re very
often pegged to a news item or pop culture strain but just as often stick to
the deeply, deeply, personal, offering a firm, closing insight or a revelation.
Its almost a genre, formed in close response to its medium—what to call these
pieces? Micro-memoirs? Candids? Unburdenings?—and there are many reasons for
their success.

I recognize the kind of click-bait pieces to which Scalise
is referring, the ones that are heavy on “honesty” and light on inquisition.
And I agree with Annie and others that meaning in nonfiction should generally
serve to complicate our most deeply-held convictions. But that’s why I find the
confessional so integral—it asks for acceptance, but not approval. The best we
can often feel about someone else’s confession is ambivalence, and ambivalence
can be the gateway for empathy.

I’ve always been leery of an art for art’s sake approach to
writing of any kind, but perhaps especially in nonfiction, I see the work as
representative, and therefore discursive. If we think of the confessional as an
act of inclusivity—a statement of “this is human, too”—then we challenge the shame
that surrounds the act of confessing. Rendering visible what was shameful helps
to remove the sanctity that supports the kind of black-and-white certitude that
makes for both bad politics and bad writing. In this way, confession becomes
political discourse, directly interrogating cliché. (Of all the parenting blogs
out there, two that do this particularly well are Emily Rapp’s Little Seal and Heather Kirn
Lanier’s Star in Her Eye.)

Back to that Facebook thread. One of the participants was
Lidia Yuknavitch, whose memoir, The
Chronology of Water, opens with the harrowing, yet gorgeously-written
scene of Yuknavitch delivering her stillborn daughter, and goes on to explore
the ramifications of growing up with an abusive father and alcoholic mother.
She chimed in with this:

Um, you do all realize the
definitions of "motherhood" are variable, multiple, mutable, made
from a variety of discourses (cultural, biological, psychological,
sociological, etc...) that sometimes reinforce each other but sometimes
contradict or interrupt each other, right? And that they vary widely from
culture to culture and person to person? And that some stories of
"motherhood" get demonized or repressed while others are sanctioned
and legitimized? Anyone? All our motherstories are worth a look at… I think
they all count and illuminate the human condition for us. Even the darker
harder ones. I've learned much from reading about drunk mothers, abandoning
mothers, absent mothers, depressed mothers, tortured mothers, prison mothers,
rich mothers, poor mothers, addicted mothers, and happy and loving mothers. We
are all of them. There's no us and them.

One of the moves I most admire in “Dropping Babies” is
Schraffenberger’s willingness to leave open the question of why the villagers
in Solapur drop their babies from the temple’s tower. “I want to say the
villagers are culturally backward,” he writes in the penultimate section. “I
want to say they’re barbarous and superstitious. I want to say this ritual is
another example of the stupid things a belief in god or gods compels otherwise
reasonable people to do. But I know the truth is something else.” What that
“something else” may be is only hinted at in the final section, when
Schraffenberger returns again to the night he dropped his daughter into her
crib. The brief fall “shut her up for a second…but the surprise hovering in her
eyes, like a sudden illumination of this dark new world, stripped all the hush
of its silence.” There is no sanctity here, and no certainty. Only ambivalence
and human frailty. Only a world where the most common and most sanctified love
is also the most primal, and therefore, the most revealing.

Amy Monticello’s
work has appeared in many places, including Salon,
Brevity, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Redivider,
and was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2013. She is an assistant
professor at SuffolkUniversity in Boston.

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